Yako Katsuragi
Yako Katsuragi (桂木 弥子 Katsuragi Yako) is a 16-year-old high school girl and the very first character introduced in the manga. She meets Neuro when he appears and desecrates her father's shrine while promising to help solve the mystery of her father's death. This meeting quickly leads to a partnership: Yako becomes Neuro's cover, pretending to be an investigator while Neuro acts as her assistant. Overview Appearance Yako is a young girl with short blonde hair (which becomes long when she merges with Akane). She wears a pair of red hairclips, one on each side. The hairclips are shaped like a grinning mouth with sharp teeth. Yako's usual attire throughout the series is her school uniform which consists of a yellow sweater and a green skirt in most of the coloured manga depictions or a pink sweater and grey skirt in the anime's depictions. Personality Yako has an insatiable appetite -with a cast iron stomach to match-, and a knack for understanding human psychology that occasionally provides Neuro with information he is unable to obtain, due to his unfamiliarity with how humans operate. Yako is even able to understand Neuro, to a degree, thanks to an amalgamation between the two aforementioned traits; she compares Neuro's opinion of food over that for oxygen to an experience that she had hunting for oysters under water. Neuro enjoys abusing her and, as she has stated many times before, has forced her to go through a lot of humiliation and torture; but despite their sadomasochistic relationship, Yako displays true affection and concern for Neuro, considering him to be one of the most important people close to her. After her fight with Neuro during the Sicks arc, it is shown that their bond has considerably strengthened. She states that they are now able to communicate without words, and Neuro shows that he truly trusts her and her capacities when he entrusts her to fight XI by herself. Before he leaves for hell, Neuro’s words and actions (such as almost hugging her) seem to show that he has grown to genuinely care for her. She is also one of the rare humans who manages to make him display real emotions, and the only one to shock him in the whole manga. Abilities Although Yako does not possess any actual skills for combat, she can stay relatively calm during high-stress situations, though she may ocassionally be shaken up when she encounters supernatural foes like X or Sicks. While her time with Neuro has definitely been a factor in this, it is left to question if Yako had this trait before she became Neuro's front. Aside from this, Yako's prominent ability that has been expanded upon throughout the series is her interest and understanding in human psychology and feelings. She also has high observation skills as shown when she easily deduced the kind of lifestyle Fumio Honjou lived just by looking at his belongings. While these abilities do not seem very significant at first glance, they have proved to be very vital in the series as Neuro lacks the ability to understand emotions and feelings, putting him in a disadvantage in certain situations as seen during the HAL arc when HAL easily countered Neuro with a password block. She is well-liked by many people, is able to form and maitain social bonds easily, and shown through the series to remain somewhat close to many characters like Aya Asia, Higuchi or even the Hayasaka brothers. Besides that, Yako's other ability would be her love for food and culinaries. She has an incredible appetite and is able to consume almost any kind of food, and in superhuman quantities. This is said to be the result of her mother's incredibly horrible cooking skills which has trained her to be able to take in anything. Haruka's cooking has also caused Yako to develop her own culinary skills which, while ocassionally dabbling with odd ingredients such as common weeds, are far superior compared to her mother's. Plot Overview Yako appears at the beginning of the series at her father's funeral. She encounters Neuro for the first time after the funeral had ended, and Neuro forcefully adopts her as his cover so that he doesn't attract any attention when he goes around solving cases and consuming the mysteries. Yako and Neuro go to a cafe where they witness a murder, which would be their first case in the series. Neuro easily solves the case while pretending Yako had did all the deductions, and the murderer is arrested. Yako brings Neuro to her house again after this, and she asks Neuro to help her reveal the person who had killed her father. Neuro easily exposes Takeda Keitaro as the culprit, and after his arrest Neuro decides to continue working with Yako. After the case at the Supreme S Neuro realises it would be easier for them to have an office as a hub so that he wouldn't have to search for Yako all the time. They go to a shady business office and meet Godai for the first time. Yako initially sees Godai as the most suspicious one, but after chatting with him she finds him the nicest one among his group. Neuro solves the case after ths, and they take over the office. Shortly after opening for business, Yako and Neuro get their first customer, Aya Asia. After some snooping around, they manage to catch Aya's demented fan. Yako realises the fan couldn't have been behind the murders and tells Neuro, who immediately gives her some praise for at least knowing that fact. They later attend Aya's concert, where Neuro throws Yako onstage during Aya's performance to reveal Aya as the killer. After Neuro gives the deductions on how the crime was done, Aya asks Yako to personally tell how she could come to that conclusion. Yako reveals Aya had done the crimes out of the need of loneliness, and Aya willingly gives herself in, stating her satisfaction in having the honor of Yako solving her crime. Neuro praises Yako again after the case and tells her he hopes to see her improve further to assist him in his search for the greatest mystery. After Aya's case, news on Phantom Thief X begin circulating the media. Around that time, a new client requests Yako and Neuro to help keep an eye on his son, who had been acting suspicious recently. They come across the son's secret hideout where he had been cruely killing local pets and compressing them into boxes just like Phantom Thief X. Yako and Neuro eventually corner him with the help of some police officers, and he reveals his motive for copying X. Neuro ignores him and reveals the real X however, and X is arrested by the police. X kills the officers in the car on the way to the police station however, and disguises himself as Yako to kill Neuro though Neuro isn't fooled and X escapes. X later captures Yako to use her against Neuro, and brainwashes her with the electronic drug. However, Neuro is quickly able to see through X’s plan and rescues her just before the police and Sicks arrive to capture X. During most of the Sicks arc, Yako does not display much of her abilities, though she relays Neuro’s instructions with her phone during the fight with Vijaya. She breaks down after witnessing Sasazuka’s and Fumio Honjo’s successive deaths, and violently quarrels with Neuro, telling him that she wishes they had never met, which concludes in him dismissing her from the office and telling her to “disappear from his sight”. However, after talking with Aya Asia, who has escaped from jail in concern for Yako after a visit from Neuro, and finding Honjo’s letter for her, she recovers from her depression and comes back to the office to apologize. Her friendship with Honjo becomes capital in Sicks’ defeat as his letter to her gives the location to Sicks’ secret hideout. During the final battle against Sicks, Yako manages to turn XI back to her former identity of Phantom thief X by letting her see memories of Ai in her brain, effectively turning X to her side. In his final moments, X says that it is thanks to her that he has found his true identity, and changes into Sasazuka to say his goodbyes, supposedly to make her cry as a mean of revenge for being defeated by her, but more likely as a way to thank her. After X’s death, Yako and Godai make a grave for him. When Zera comes to inform Neuro that he is dying, Yako urges him to go back to Hell and come back quickly (she is the first human who manages to shock Neuro as she called him a “stupid demon”), and spends the night talking with him before he leaves. Three years, later, Yako has become a worldwide famous detective, and is shown helping to capture terrorists in Mexico. She is last seen sitting in a plane, where Neuro appears on the other side of the window. Category:Characters Category:Detectives Category:Female Characters